At Dreamforce, Marc Benioff is king. But can he defend his throne?

It’s that point once more when 40,000 folks from across the global community congregate in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood for Salesforce’s annual buyer mega-conference, Dreamforce.

It’s a spectacle. Howard Street in entrance of Moscone Center is closed and lined in faux grass. Humanoid robots dance for onlookers. Thousands of tourists sport their blue attendee lanyards, even after hours for some motive as they congregate in bars and eating places throughout town. And when DJs aren’t bumping their mixes nonstop, it’s as a result of a shock live performance has taken the stage, with Cold War Kids performing Tuesday and Ziggy Marley on Wednesday.

It’s additionally a spot the place tech CEOs flock like migratory birds. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman speak about pacing synthetic intelligence growth, whereas Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is looking bulls—t on doomerism. And as the parents sitting and watching them push and shove to get a seat as in the event that they had been attempting to get barricade spots at Outside Lands, Marc Benioff is on the heart of all of it.

The Salesforce CEO and founder is bigger than life, and never simply because he’s 6-foot-5. In plenty of methods, he’s not just like the tech leaders who are sometimes hogging the limelight. For starters, he’s charismatic and likeable, two traits which are usually arduous to come back by with the tech elite. At his keynote handle on Tuesday, Benioff commanded the room as he jaunted round, selecting to tempo the ground round attendees as an alternative of talking from a podium. There’s no query he’s in cost. After all, it’s a convention for his firm.

Benioff’s power comes as his firm is dealing with an unsure future. Artificial intelligence is altering the software program recreation. Salesforce has spent a lot of this 12 months dispelling fears of the “SaaSpocalypse,” or the downfall of software program as a service as AI turns into extra highly effective. Benioff referred to as the risk “loopy nonsense” in his Tuesday keynote speech, and the corporate simply launched its personal AI product powered by Anthropic’s Claude. Though Salesforce is very large, serving over 150,000 clients worldwide and touching nearly each business, cloud-based buyer relationship administration isn’t attractive. Meanwhile within the AI global community, CEOs like Amodei, Altman, Huang, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are actually debating whose tech goes to kill us all first, if in any respect. 

Despite that, Benioff appeared like a king on Tuesday. He towered over Amodei, who spent the previous week telling the entire world that people had been on monitor to go extinct within the close to future. He boasted about Salesforce’s contributions to San Francisco, together with tens of millions to town’s school district, hospitals and police. So far, he’s prevented controversy this 12 months, a greater begin than in 2025 when he needed to apologize for supporting sending the national guard to San Francisco to rein in crime. 

He additionally urged extra of his tech “brethren” to be simply as philanthropic to the Bay Area as he has, noting that he prolonged his giving throughout the bay to Oakland as a result of we couldn’t “have an ideal San Francisco and not using a nice Oakland.” At a personal media occasion following the keynote, he took additional time to reply questions from a various media scrum, even displaying off a bit of Japanese. 

But there was a small second on the keynote, really easy to overlook, that was telling of Benioff’s place within the tech business. It started when Huang was on the microphone. The Nvidia chief turned over his shoulder and advised Benioff “simply comply with me.” The crowd laughed, and Benioff responded, “You’ve received this. Jensen, we’re all following you, bro.”

Just as he stated that, he put two fingers on Huang’s shoulders to steer him. In a break up second, Huang shook off Benioff and stepped forward of him, simply earlier than he hesitated and put his arm round his again. It was a wierd sequence — a type of tug-of-war of displaying who’s in cost — at heart stage. Huang took management of the room, Benioff tried to rein him in, and the 2 met within the center, persevering with their stroll across the room facet by facet. Again, sufficiently small to overlook, however large enough that it got here up in dialog at a Dreamforce after-party later that evening. 

By no means was Benioff knocked off his throne. After all, it was solely 5 seconds out of three full days of what’s primarily the tech global community’s homecoming week. Not to say Benioff has been on prime for years. His identify is on UCSF’s kids’s hospital in Oakland, his Salesforce Tower defines town skyline, and the park atop the Salesforce Transit Center is considered one of downtown’s extra nice spots. His firm is doing properly amid fears that it’s over for software program. But for only a second, anyone else turned the star at Benioff’s personal present. 

Dreamforce is the most important stage potential for the corporate, and Benioff himself, to indicate it’s nonetheless an enormous participant as AI takes over. Perhaps it’s inevitable that finally software program is phased out, simply as any tech has to evolve. 

But till that occurs, and whereas Benioff nonetheless has his crown, can he attempt to steer his colleagues, or will he get shrugged off? That stays to be seen.  

Attending Dreamforce and wish to discuss? Contact tech reporter Matthew Brown securely at [email protected] or matthewbrownsfgate.11 on Signal.